‘Exposed’ by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens is part of ‘Love Art Lab’
Chelsea Theatre, London
Saturday 22nd September 2007

You might have heard of Annie Sprinkle as the former porn star and sex-worker turned performance artist, whose piece ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ invited audience members to look inside her vagina. You might also have heard of Elizabeth Stephens, a multimedia artist and academic who has been making work about women’s sexuality for over a decade. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. In ‘Exposed’ Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens aren’t here to talk to you about their work, their egos, their politics. Sure, it might come up along the way, but what’s really being exposed here is their mutual affection for each other and their explicit desire to “make the world a more fun, sexy, tolerant, well-educated, love-filled place”.

‘Exposed’ is part of ‘Love Art Lab’, a seven-year performance piece devised by the two artists, that includes visual art, theatre, performance, interventions, filmmaking, lectures, printed matter and activism. The structure of Love Art Lab is born out of a spirit of generosity and collaboration – artist Linda M. Montano invited other artists to use her seven year theme. Sprinkle and Stephens have incorporated the seven chakras into the Love Art Lab schema, which means that 2007, with ‘Exposed’ in its third year, is the year of the yellow chakra – signifiying courage and power.

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens tell us about their relationship – including the story of how they met, the story of how they got (and continue to get) married, the story of how they tried to get pregnant. The two women talk over each other, meandering in and out of the same narrative, occasionally waiting for the other to hurry up or remember her cue. Their stage presence together is affectionate and affecting, and told in this way their stories add up to more than just anecdotes. They are a record and manifestation of Sprinkle and Stephens’ life together.

This means that there are bad bits as well as good. Annie’s breast cancer elicits one of the only non-spoken parts of the show. The cancer comes as a horrific surprise to the audience, who until now have been able to revel in the joyousness of Annie and Elizabeth’s relationship. But the illness also makes clear quite how apparent - and infectious - their love for each other has become.

Aside from the cancer, the joyful tone of the performance means that when politics does crop up, it’s in the nicest possible way. There’s an open debate about marriage when Annie and Elizabeth describe how they decided to get hitched. They invite discussion with the audience, hear everyone out and hand round a list of reasons about why marriage is a bad idea. Then they quietly give their reasons, and get on with the show. It’s an inclusive and respectful example of the artists’ dictum to spread love around, and it seems – like everything in this show – to be completely natural.

The catalyst for making ‘Love Art Lab’ was the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These particular wars hang behind ‘Exposed’, making the performance an act of defiance against war and everything it stands for. But it is referenced obliquely by familiar footage of US troops in a desert, which emphasies the fact that ‘Exposed’ is an indirect reaction to violence and destruction. Critics may say this makes it harmless at best, and evasive at worst. But I defy even the most hardened cynics to spend an hour and a half in these artists’ company and not come out with their hearts melted. Perhaps this is a throwback to an idealistic, seventies kind of activism, but it feels genuine and efffective nonetheless. Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens ask us all to, ‘spread a little love’, and by the time you leave the theatre you’ll be urging others to do the same.

Written by Mary Paterson

http://www.loveartlab.org/
http://www.anniesprinkle.org/
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/stephens/

Nicola Conibere for Gynmastics

The Conceptual Leap

Grunts for the Arts Sports Day 2,
Burgess Park, London,
15 September 2007

In March of this year, the UK government announced it would divert £675 million of lottery money from funding for the arts in order to offset the costs of the 2012 Olympic Games. This included an immediate £29 million drop – from £83 million to £54 million – in this year’s Grants for Arts budget. The cut is already having a drastic effect on the ability of arts organisations and individuals to plan and make their work.

Because Grants for the Arts supports a wide range of individual projects, the effects of this cut will be felt in many places, including artistic collaborations with schools, charities and throughout the public sector. Grants for the Arts programme’s £54 million budget is trivial when compared with the £5,100 million projected cost of widening the M1, the £15,000 million projected cost of replacing the Trident missile system, or the £18,000 million projected cost of the national ID card scheme (£32 million of which has already been spent without any tangible results).

A number of ongoing efforts have been made to persuade the government to rethink this cut or to make up for it in its forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review, including an online petition with over 25,000 signatures (http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/lotteryolympics/, now closed) and a coalition of arts organisations under the name Independent Arts (http://independentarts.org.uk). But artist Tim Jeeves has taken an ‘if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em’ approach with his ‘Grunts for the Arts’ project, which promotes the retraining of artists into Olympic athletes. One of the outcomes of this project was the second ‘Grunts for the Arts Sports Day’ in Burgess Park, London. (The first Grunts for the Arts Sports Day was held in May on Hackney Marshes, part of the 2012 Olympic site.)

The Grunts for the Arts Sports Day consisted of a number of ingenious versions of typical sporting events, including a gymnastic event with extra points for the competitor’s dramatic death pose, a 20-person relay with each stage only 2m long, an Olympic doughnut ring eating contest, and (my contribution) the Conceptual Leap. The day ended with Richard Dedomenici’s contribution to the evolution of football: ‘Triball’, in which three teams play on a three-sided pitch with three goals and two balls.

The weather was gorgeous, and the whole day was a reminder that both art and sport should be a celebration of collective spirit and local participation, something increasingly lacking in the global branding exercises of the Olympic Games franchise. There were plenty of reflections on the realities of being an artist working in the UK funding system, including an argument over ‘measurables’ during the Handbag Hurling, or the requirement that competitors in the Tour de Park Cocktail Race display not only artistic and athletic prowess but also the ability to sell their product to the assembled crowd. But most inspiring of all was the way in which a few young children and a group of developmentally disabled people joined in with the fun – a reminder of the arts’ ability to spontaneously bridge gaps without any sight of bureaucratic targets or comprehensive strategy papers.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Further information:

Grunts for the Arts website:
http://gruntsforthearts.wordpress.com/

Find out what you can do at the Independent Arts
campaigning website: http://independentarts.org.uk

Submit your comments before the Comprehensive Spending Review: http://csr07.treasury.gov.uk/survey/

New Work Network members can join the discussion here:

http://www.newworknetwork.org.uk/modules/

Facebook members can join the group ‘Campaign against the cuts in funding for the arts’: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2301243429

BOiLEROOM: The Terrific Electric at the Barbican 10 Sept 2007

Touch Wood #1 at The Place, 11 Sept 2007

My interest in live art means I am always looking out for new and emerging work across various performance disciplines, so this week took me to the results of two very different schemes supporting new work: BOiLEROOM’s ‘The Terrific Electric’ at the Barbican, supported by the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust (OSBTT) Award, and ‘Touch Wood #1’, a complement to this summer’s Choreodrome dance development programme at The Place. The two experiences could not have been more different.

According to the Barbican programme notes, the OSBTT Award aims to support ‘emerging practitioners engaged in bold, innovative and challenging theatre’ by ‘facilitating the transition from fringe to studio spaces’. OSBTT does this through a generous grant and various levels of mentoring (this year’s scheme was mentored by Mark Ravenhill). It was such a shame therefore, that BOiLEROOM’s The Terrific Electric was a dull, poorly structured assemblage of visual theatre clichés.

The Terrific Electric is ostensibly about the impact of electricity, radio and the idea of new technology in general on the lives of three - more or less hysterical - women from another era. The show wears its visual theatre influences obviously: costumes hanging from the ceiling, quirky dancing and magic tricks, a facile voiceover, and an agonising fondness for video projection. The company describes itself as practicing ‘investigative theatre’ and claim to be interested in various questions about the world outside the theatre – though its references to science and history amount to little more than crude caricatures. But the real failure of The Terrific Electric is that it is not inquisitive enough about theatre itself. What is this collection of titbits and slapstick supposed to create? What effect are they trying to create? Why do this as a live performance as opposed to any other form? For a piece essentially about a singer losing her voice, this show has no heart.

It made me wonder where the OSBTT process went wrong: BOiLEROOM’s ideas sound interesting on paper, and the performers are clearly capable (even if they are too often reduced to over-egged pandering to the audience). I wonder if the clue might be in the phrase ‘transition from fringe to studio spaces’, and whether this particular transition made it too easy for BOiLEROOM to emphasise style and marketing with insufficient attention to substance and structure. It’s as if BOiLEROOM has tried to do everything they’ve seen ‘professional’ companies do but missed out on the invisible but crucial task of developing its basic ideas and goals – which suggests something lacking in the structure of the OSBTT scheme. The result reflects poorly on OSBTT, the Barbican and BOiLEROOM; who were doubtless overwhelmed by this opportunity and are now not likely to get many more.

It was such a refreshing change, then, to attend the first (#1) evening of The Place’s Touch Wood season, a new feature for 2007 in which artists, most of whom have participated in the Choreodrome programme, are invited to present in-development work to the public. In contrast to the over-produced and under-thought feeling of The Terrific Electric, Touch Wood’s selling point is its back-to-basics minimalism: the dance floor of the Robin Howard Theatre has been stripped away, revealing the bare wood underneath and there are no curtains or blacks on the sides. As associate director Eddie Nixon explains in his welcome, the idea is to recreate the feeling of the studio.

‘Touch Wood #1’ featured four new works (rounded off by a reprise of Shobana Jeyasingh’s ‘Prologue’ from her company’s 2004 production ‘Transtep’). All these four new works, in a marked contrast to The Terrific Electric, shared a studied attention to the basic elements that make up the performance. Watching Temitope Ajose-Cutting’s ‘BASE’ felt like watching someone learning how to put these pieces together: solo dance, group dynamics and unison, and working with live musicians, costume, and lights. It had an easy, confident theatrical language, and though it may not have had anything particularly powerful to say with this language, it was well structured, dynamic and exuberant. Similarly, Zoi Dimitriou’s work ‘Dromoi’ gave considered attention to each gesture so that the simple first action of unwinding a microphone cable to mark out a square around the stage took on an engrossing symbolism that set the mood for his sparse and meditative piece.

But the real standout was Colin Poole’s ‘Joyride’, which became truly electrifying – and terrifying – by adding the relationship with the audience to the elements with which it works. This provocative, brave and disquieting piece begins with a typical scene from an airport or holding cell: Poole removing some clothing and emptying his pockets of loose change, keys, and passport. But he doesn’t stop there, and he’s soon completely naked, staring us straight in the eyes and moving with the graceful fury of Rilke’s panther. ‘Okay. Let’s talk’ he says. ‘Get to know each other better. Relax. Get things off our chest.’ Never breaking eye contact, Poole reflects back all the uncomfortable thoughts we might be having about his nakedness, his dancer's body, his blackness on display: ‘I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re dreaming. I know what you’re wishing.’ Held together by Poole’s incredibly skilled control over his voice, gaze, and body, this is powerful and mesmerising work which both depends upon and challenges its relationship with the audience – it is as much a live art intervention into the dance world as a piece of dance.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Touch Wood continues at The Place until 6 October:
http://www.theplace.org.uk/?lid=7885. Colin Poole’s 'Joyride' will be presented again on 20 September. Tickets cost £5-£15, book online or call the Box Office on 020 7121 1100.

BOiLEROOM’s The Terrific Electric is on at the Barbican until 15 September

Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust website:
http://www.osbttrust.com